With post offices like this, who needs email? My friend Michele Angelini over at Italian Ways has made the kind of archeological design discovery that comes close to matching Heinrich Schliemann’s excavation of the historical Troy. Only this is neither buried nor ruined. One can walk right into The Palace of the Post Office...

Louise Fili is the most elegant woman I know—no exaggeration—so I had to smile when I learned the title of her monograph was Elegantissima (Princeton Architectural Press). She’s also the most Italian Italian-American I know. (She gets Italian cable!) Louise teaches a summer workshop for the School of Visual Arts back in the old...

The Italian Futurists were nothing if not self-promoting. The number of magazines, newspapers, and other printed matter that extolled their ideas was incredible. And the frequency of exhibitions over two decades was just as staggering. Futurist exhibit catalogs allow a vivid look into how a movement, so anti–entrenched art establishment as it was, found...

Here in Roma the streets are filled with typographic history. But my interest today is Futuristic artifacts. My first souvenir is a deck of postcards featuring caricatures drawn by Tullio Crali, the Futurist painter whose paintings combine speed, aerial flight, and the mechanics of aerial warfare. These caricatures of F.T. Marinetti were made by...